Book Review

Montauk Babies: The Many Lives of Al Leedskalnin O.H. Krill, illustrated by John Malloy, Reality Press (diesel-ebooks.com), 2006 Review by Mike Pursley

Montauk Babies is a bit like being shot from a canon, or so I would imagine. Author O.H. Krill and illustrator John Malloy have created a dazzling thrill ride of a novel well suited for the Bob Frissell and Terence McKenna school of informed paranoia. Beginning with the novel’s medical warning against unsupervised trance states and a dedication to Nikola Tesla, the psychic terrain of Montauk Babies is obvious quite early. Al Leedskalnin and Peabody Freeman are traveling throughout the mid-West in a brown 1974 Buick. The year is nearly 2012; Al and Peabody are desperately trying to fix holes of anti-matter of ever increasing size that threaten to destroy the planet.

Al Leedskalnin is one of the most entertaining characters in the genre of UFO-pole shift-action-sci-fi; and if such a genre never existed before, damn-it, it does now! Al took part in experiments at Montauk Island, where he was demolecularized into various people throughout space and time. The Al that Montauk Babies readers encounter in 2011 has been damaged to a tragic but comedic degree. He often fades and becomes pixilated due to his past disembodied travels. Regular zaps from Peabody’s Quantum energy device allow him to remain somewhat functional. Al is a man made old by the new age.

Krill’s characters take a Burroughs “technology is a virus” approach to the topic. Montauk Babies argues that technological advancement is growing faster than humanity is able to keep up with it. The fight with technology becomes ever more concrete when clones of Al and Peabody appear. These doubles seem a bit scrambled, and their antics provide a healthy dose of comic relief. UFOs also materialize periodically “from the moist ether.” Their proximity creates a state of gnosis that affects the characters. Remote viewer Browning provides some of Montauk Babies’ most mystical moments; his excursions take the reader to a realm one part DMT hyperspace and one part Pythagorean resonation.

With its wide range of alternative subject matter and its chopped and rearranged text to up the schizophrenic ante, Montauk Babies is absolutely enjoyable. Any reader who picks up all the counterculture, occult and scientific references deserves an A for well-versed scholarship of the weird.